For shelter dog, second time was a charm

By the time she got the call, Crystal Rienick had more or less adopted the little Chihuahua into her family.

He had a new name — Pickle, after the shape of his body — and his outlook was improving in the two days since Rienick had stopped to rescue him on the side of Bear Valley Parkway, on Dec. 4.

“I look off the side of the road and there’s this little Chihuahua, in and out of traffic,” she recalled. “He wasn’t microchipped, no tags, nothing. The next day, I put up some signs where I found him. He stayed with us for two days and we fell deeply, madly in love with him.”

On the third day, a 9-year-old girl from Escondido called to claim him, Rienick told me: “I had to leave quick before I cried, but I said, ‘Hey, if he needs a home, here’s my number.’ It kind of lit a fire — I wanted another dog, because this one fit in so well with our family.”

The family includes Rienick and her husband, Jameson Rienick, plus two horses and an 8-year-old miniature pinscher named Pippin.

But Rienick’s temporary brush with the Chihuahua left her scouring the Escondido Humane Society website for a puppy.

“Christmas Eve, I was showing the dogs we had picked out to my parents and brother,” she recalled. “I hadn’t looked at it for about a week, so we’re scrolling down, and lo and behold, there he was.”

A tan Chihuahua stared back from the pixels of her computer screen.

“I was 90 percent certain it was the same dog,” she said. “Same stripe, same coloring, same head shape — we were pretty sure.”

Rienick didn’t sleep that night, and on the day after Christmas headed down to the shelter to settle the mystery.

“He greeted us and everything seemed OK, then he peed all over everything and we knew it was him,” she said with a laugh.

It turned out that the society had received the dog on Dec. 10, just a few days after Rienick had returned him to his owners.

Rienick said that shelters sometimes refer to tan Chihuahuas as “double-cursed,” because “there are so many Chihuahuas in shelters, and so many of them are tan.”

But I sense that there has rarely been a shelter dog as wanted as Pickle, who is now house-trained and apparently loving his new digs in Poway.

“He’s super-smart — like a little sponge,” said Rienick. “They couldn’t tell me if he’d been given up or found, but he’d been there for two weeks before we were reunited.

“He didn’t seem to come from the best conditions — he wasn’t neutered, he was skinny, he wasn’t tagged, and just from his behavior it was apparent that ... he wasn’t allowed in the house,” she added.

“Now he sleeps on the king-size Tempur-Pedic.”

Cutting a ribbon: Officials in Carlsbad will christen a clubhouse five years in the making on Thursday, when the Bressi Ranch Clubhouse is unveiled by the Boys & Girls Clubs of Carlsbad.

Marketing director Pat Maldi wrote last week that the project began in February 2008, “and construction was done in phases as funds were raised.”

At 4 p.m. Thursday, Carlsbad Mayor Matt Hall is expected to join club CEO Brad Holland and longtime supporter Greg Nelson for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, followed by a public open house on Friday.

The club’s most important visitors, however, will arrive on Monday, Feb. 4 — the first day of business for the new clubhouse, which is expected to serve more than 300 children a day at 2730 Bressi Ranch Way.